Facebook open-sources Torchnet to accelerate AI research

Facebook today is publishing an academic paper and a blog post detailing Torchnet, a new piece of open-source software that’s designed to streamline deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence. Deep learning is a trendy approach that involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, like photos, and then getting the neural networks to make predictions about new data. Rather than build a completely new deep learning framework, of which there are many, Facebook chose to build on top of Torch, an open-source library to which Facebook has previously contributed. “It makes it really easy to, for instance, completely hide the costs for I/O [input/output], which is something that a lot of people need if you want to train a practical large-scale deep learning system,” Laurens van der Maaten,…